Variability and dynamics of patriotic attitudes of Russians in the context of Special military operation

The article presents the results of a study of the features of socio-political dispositions characteristic of moderate and convinced types of patriotic attitudes. Additionally, an analysis of the dynamics of changes in the ratio of the shares of both types of patriotism in 2024 in the context of SMO in comparison with the situation in 2020 was carried out. The empirical basis of the study was data from a mass survey of the population of the Russian Federation conducted by the Institute of Sociology of FCTAS in February-March 2024 on a representative all-Russian sample. The sample size is 2000 respondents. For comparison, data from a similar survey in 2020 were used. The criterion for typologizing different variants of patriotism is the quantitative difference in the degree of support for judgments of a civil and protective nature, forming a space of patriotic meanings of emotional, cognitive and behavioral aspects of attitude towards Russia. Based on the results of the analysis of data on the assessment of the degree of agreement with judgments of civil and protective meaning, moderate and convinced types of patriotism were identified, which together make up the system of patriotic attitudes of Russians. An analysis of the interrelationships of each type of patriotism with a wide range of socio-political dispositions has shown that the selected types represent integral symptom complexes of views on the country, its current state and development prospects, significantly differing in their stable trends over time. Such a trend for convinced patriots is a focus on traditionalism, and for moderate patriots – on modernism. A comparison of data on the prevalence of a particular type of patriotism in 2020 with similar data in 2024 allowed us to conclude that if in 2020 the system of patriotic attitudes of Russians was in a stable state with the dominance of modernist trends, then in 2024 there was a “shift” of the entire system of patriotic beliefs to a different quality, but equally stable a state, but already dominated by traditionalist tendencies. In general, it is concluded that the system of patriotic attitudes of Russians is very mobile in terms of activating both civil and protective meanings, which in different socio-political contexts leads either to an increase or decrease in the proportion of supporters of one or another of the studied types in the system as a whole.